Twenty years ago, in a town he had no intention of leaving, Wanderers fan John Foster wrote a song about Bolton. On Saturday lunchtime, as Wanderers walk out for our first Championship game at this ground in seven years, you are going to hear a rerecording of it.
There is a question every band from this part of the world gets asked, usually by somebody from London holding a clipboard. Where are you from?
There is an easy answer. It is twelve miles down the road, it has a famous music scene attached to it. Plenty of bands born within earshot of Bolton Parish Church have given it. Nobody ever checks.
The Jade Assembly have never given it once.
"There are bands I know, bands I like, who are from Bolton," says John "Foz" Foster, the band's singer and songwriter, sat in the stands at the Toughsheet Community Stadium on a warm Tuesday evening. "And when they get asked where they're from, they say Manchester. We've never done that."
That is worth holding onto, because it explains everything about what will happen just before kick off on Saturday.
Twenty years, six record deals and a town they refused to leave behind
The Jade Assembly started the way the good ones usually do. A couple of mates who liked the same records, working out that Led Zeppelin and Oasis and The Who all pointed in roughly the same direction. It began as a two-piece. Gareth "Smed" Smedley came in on lead guitar, Andy Watson settled behind the drums, Danny Hayes took the bass and what had been two lads with a shared record collection became a band with a rhythm section you could feel in your chest.
Two decades on, the CV is longer than most bands ever manage. Kendal Calling. Isle of Wight. Ramsbottom. Liverpool Sound City. Bingley, supporting The Libertines, on a bill with Shed Seven. A headline slot on the main stage at the Bolton Food and Drink Festival. A single with Ugly Man Records, the label that gave Elbow their start. A stage shared with Bonehead out of Oasis. Clint Boon, of Inspiral Carpets and Radio X, once described them in print as the best guitar band since Kasabian, which is not the sort of sentence a DJ hands out lightly.
And a back catalogue that has quietly stacked up while nobody outside the Jade Army was counting. One Last Time. Nothing Changes. Show Me The Sun. Take Me Home. Vulcan. Time For A Change. Got My Star. Peel Me Off The Ceiling. Big Pub In The Sky. Last Stand. Ziggy. It took them fifteen years to get around to a full album, which tells you something about a band who were always more interested in the next song than the paperwork.
Six record deals, by Foz's own count. Radio play on BBC Introducing, XFM, 6 Music. And then, in the spring of 2020, the thing that flattened a generation of bands.
"We were in a really good position just before Covid," he says. "Our manager at the time was planning an American tour. Then Covid came and everything just fell through. And when things started getting back to normal, all the contacts he'd made had gone."
He is remarkably unbitter about it, in the way people from this town tend to be about things that did not go their way.
"Making it in a band is like becoming a professional footballer," he says. "The amount of people who are good enough and don't. There are hundreds of bands better than some of the ones who made it. Sometimes it's just being in the right place at the right time. But we've had the time of our lives doing it."
They signed their record deal on this pitch
Here is the part that makes this more than a nice local story.
During the Premier League years, The Jade Assembly signed a record deal on the pitch at this stadium. Not in an office in Soho. On the grass, in front of the stands, with the video going out on the big screen and their first Fan Zone slot to follow. One of their songs was later played out at Wembley before an FA Cup semi-final.
Ask most bands for their career highlight and you get a festival headline. Ask Foz and you get this.
"If we never do anything again in the music industry," he says, "the support we've had from Bolton Wanderers makes it all worthwhile. And I'm not just saying that."
He is not. You can tell by how quickly he says it.
The song
Our Town was one of the first songs Foz ever wrote for the band, which puts it at roughly twenty years old. He wrote it, he says, simply because of how much he loved the place.
"There aren't many bands who write a song about their own town and just come out and say it," he says. "We actually say it. We're Bolton lads until the day we die."
If you grew up here in the nineties you will recognise the town in it. The precinct on a Saturday. A night out that people travelled in for rather than out of. A place that thought quite a lot of itself, and had every reason to.
The song has never left their set. They played it at a friend's wedding a while back, a Bolton lad's wedding, and had not quite reckoned on how many Boltonians would be in the room.
"They were all going berserk," Foz says. "It's still one of our favourites to play to this day."
Now there is a new version. The band have gone back into the studio and reworked it, changing some of the lyrics so that the song is about the club as well as the town, because for them the two were never really separate things in the first place. It is the same song written by the same lad about the same streets. It has just grown a white shirt.
It is released on Friday 14 August, and you can pre-save it now: https://ditto.fm/our-town-the-jade-assembly
What happens next is up to you
We want to be straight about something, because Foz was straight about it with us.
The club is not going to stand here and tell you this is your anthem. He would not want us to and he knows this crowd far too well to think it would work.
"Bolton fans don't like being told what to like," he says. "I'd rather it came from the fans. If you push it too hard, people see it. Play it, and if it's organic, it'll take off."
So that is the whole plan. On Saturday, as Steven Schumacher's side come out of the tunnel to face Preston North End in front of a near-full house, live on Sky Sports, Our Town will be playing. It was written a couple of miles from where you will be sitting, by a Wanderer, about this town and about this club.
You will either take it or you won't. That has always been your call and it always will be.
But if you fancy the odds, consider this. It is a song about Bolton, written by Bolton lads who spent twenty years being offered an easier postcode and turned it down every single time, arriving on the day we come back to the Championship at this ground for the first time in seven years.
You could not have scripted the timing better if you tried.
Our Town is out on Friday 14 August. Pre-save it here: https://ditto.fm/our-town-the-jade-assembly
The Jade Assembly are John "Foz" Foster (vocals, guitar), Gareth "Smed" Smedley (lead guitar), Danny Hayes (bass) and Andy Watson (drums). Foz, Smed and Andy came down to the stadium this week for photographs and to talk to us, and you will be seeing a fair bit of them in the Fan Zone across the season.
Bolton Wanderers v Preston North End, Saturday 15 August, 12.30pm, live on Sky Sports.